


the magic in her reach

by todreaminscarlet



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Hogwarts AU, during & post hogwarts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-25
Updated: 2016-06-25
Packaged: 2018-07-18 02:37:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7296154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/todreaminscarlet/pseuds/todreaminscarlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Susan has loved and lost, and it is not so easy to remember the pain now. It is easier to be swept away, to throw herself headfirst into the potential and love and power offered to her on bended knee.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the magic in her reach

**Author's Note:**

> tom x susan obviously. 
> 
> for @digorykirke on tumblr who asked for more of this ridiculous crack ship that I can't help but take a little seriously.

 

She falls in love with him before she can stop herself.

 

If she’s honest, though, she never really tried.

 

* * *

 

 

She comes back to school after that long, fifteen-year summer quiet and composed, steady-eyed and strong-lipped, just a girl after all this time with black robes which hide her child-like figure and fingers which are not strong enough to do all that she remembers.

 

(She had a to-do list left in the castle before they went hunting. There were still three tasks left. She runs them over in her mind, over and over, hoping someone finished them. There were just three items left.)

 

She slinks through the halls when she first returns. The magic is real and alive, but it’s a different kind of magic and the wood in her hand feels rough and superfluous, and she can’t find a way to explain that she doesn’t need it anymore, so she doesn’t say anything, just skates the cool grey walls of the castle, wanders through her days, and thinks, _have they finished my list?_

 

* * *

 

She is quieter now than she used to be; the smiles she used to bestow are fainter now and further and farther between. The food, even in a magic hall, is dull and tasteless, and she can only manage to shuffle the food around her plate before sipping on her pumpkin juice and slipping out the door.

 

She doesn’t talk to many people; they’re so young, she thinks. So caught up in their juvenile concerns and dramas and crushes and so removed from the muggles’ war that she cannot bear it.

 

So she walks away.

 

She hides herself in the folds of her robes and tries so hard to be less (less than a queen, than a woman, than a girl). She answers all the questions correctly but doesn’t push for more, doesn’t allow herself to take more than what she has been given.

 

It’ll have to be enough.

 

* * *

 

(She can’t sleep either. The room is too small, the breathing too loud, the sheets too coarse. She wants her spacious chambers and her cool halls and her silken sheets. She wants her domain, her kingdom, her title, her recognition. She wants to know that Aletary had her pups all right and that Mrs. Terrean recovered from the injury to her paw and that Lihta returned from her expedition to view the northern stars. She wants to know that the trading agreement she and Edmund drafted was put into effect and that the kingdom is secure and that her paintings were set out to dry, that Lune is well. She needs to know. The uncertainty is driving her mad.)

 

* * *

 

She sits outside Hogwarts on the slope and can hear the cheers from the Quidditch match off in the distance. Most of the students are there and so Susan rests alone with the Scottish autumn winds blowing cool air across her face and colored leaves across the ground. The sky has already clouded over for the season, and she wishes that the sun would break through just for a moment. A powerful gust sweeps through the air and Susan huddles deeper inside her cloak and into her scarf and closes her eyes.

 

The wind swooshes through the air, and it’s frightfully cold and Susan would go inside except that when she sits alone in the tower it is only her thoughts for company, and they make a poor distraction.

 

She opens her eyes again to watch the rainbowed leaves twist on their branches and a lucky few break away and swirl through the air. She breathes in and out, and she tries not to think.

 

“Here,” she hears, and she looks up to see Tom Riddle offer her a steaming cup of tea. Susan starts with surprise. They’ve not talked since he asked after her summer. She sees him in the halls, holding court over the brutish Slytherins who follow him like dogs, and she has ignored him for once, his presence now not enough to capture her attention. He stands patiently waiting for her, the cup of tea lowered in his hands, and cautiously, Susan raises her hand to relieve him of the cup.

 

“Thank you,” she tells him as she shifts it in her gloved hands and looks up at him from under her eyelashes. “I appreciate it.”

 

Tom gracefully folds himself on the ground beside her and carefully balances his own teacup in his hands. He offers a small smile in recognition of her gratitude and then they sit in silence.

 

He doesn’t speak, and Susan doesn’t have any words to offer, so they just sit, Hogwarts to their backs and the world before them with the winds for a symphony and the leaves for a painting.

 

Susan brings the steaming cup of tea to her lips, takes a sip; it burns her tongue.

 

* * *

 

He finds her more often after that, just little moments in the breaks of their days, in hallways, in the library, in nooks and crannies and hidden spaces. It’s public at first, the return of their private smiles and nods and acknowledgements. It’s a reminder to her peers that she exists, that young Tom Riddle remembers her (likes her) and its enough to distract her sometimes.

 

(It’s a curiosity to her peers that quiet little Susan Pevensie is enough to fascinate the charming Tom Riddle, that the girl with the sad eyes and straight shoulders should capture his attention, make him smile.)

 

He seeks her (and he always finds her). They sit together in the library’s dusty silence, in the chill of the courtyard, just moments sometimes and sometimes hours. It’s words full of passion and interest, everything and nothing, the possibility of magic, of knowledge, of classes and ideas and sheer audacity. It’s beat after beat of just the winds howling and candles flickering and papers rustling in their ears, knuckles just barely pressed against knuckles. It’s moments of companionship and a burgeoning friendship; it’s waking in the morning to wonder when she will see him, wanting to tell him about a book she has found. It’s talking to him for hours and never thinking once about a list resting on a desk a whole world away.

 

* * *

 

 

They leave for the summer. They go back to Narnia.

 

They see Narnia’s splendor and heartbreak, the devastation which took control when they had abandoned them to chase their own whims. 

 

Her list is long gone. 

 

She tries not to think about it. 

 

(There’s a just young boy and a faithful Narnian few to face the odds of a nation and a king and an army. It’s not until after that she remembers that those odds are not too slim for Aslan. By then, she doesn’t care.)

 

_You won’t come again_ , Aslan tells them, and Peter’s face falls and she can see his heart break and she watches as he looks up again and kneels and offers his shattered heart in service to a damned lion who can’t appreciate it or perhaps just doesn’t want it, and she doesn’t feel anything. 

 

( _That’s a lie_ , she thinks in a few minutes. She feels too much.)

 

They leave then, as if they had never come, and so she offers a single wave, turns, and walks through the tree’s wooden door and never looks back. 

 

* * *

 

She won’t think of Narnia again. 

 

(She won’t.)

 

* * *

 

“You’re spending a great deal of time with Tom,” Peter says, a month after they have returned to school.

 

Susan looks up at Peter, twinkles her eyes at him. “I’m so relieved to know your eyes are working well, Peter dear.”

 

“Su, honestly,” Peter says, leaning in across the table in the Great Hall. His voice lower, he continues, “don’t you think there’s something off about him?”

 

Susan straightens and stares back at him. “We’re in a hall of magic, Peter. There’s something off about all of us.”

 

“Keep your guard up, that’s all,” he tells her, his blue eyes gleaming concern.

 

“I always do,” she says. “But I won’t feed into this ridiculous rivalry of yours and your inability to see the redeeming qualities in anyone besides a Gryffindor.” She stands and grabs her book and Peter reaches over and gently holds her arm.

 

“Be careful, Su,” he says, and his eyes are sad and for a moment she regrets her words, but honestly she’s not going to do this, not now, not here, not with Peter, so she shakes his hand off and moves away.

 

“Goodbye Peter,” she throws over her shoulder.

 

* * *

 

Tom’s devoted followers don’t seem to know what to make of her, although to be fair to them (even though she has no particular interest in doing so) no one in the school seem to know. 

 

Tom is the only one who can make her smile, can make the studied blankness of her face break into life and pleasure and amusement for all too brief seconds.  But he can and she does, and he seeks her out and she responds in kind. 

 

She is not particularly kind to them, just tolerant of their presence and childlike sheepishness. 

 

“Honestly Tom,” she tells him. “Just send them away.” 

 

He does, almost. (He smiles at her tolerantly, fondly, and the boys always stop a hallway away. Just a hallway.)

 

“They’re useful, Susan,” he says. 

 

“Useful, how?” she asks. 

 

He doesn’t answer. 

 

* * *

 

She can’t focus; her attention should be wholly on the tome in front of her as her eyes faithfully stare but she can’t stop feeling distracted. Tom sits in front of her, his eyes steadily studying the papers in front of him, his fingers absently tapping the tip of his quill against the table. 

 

She watches from under the flutter of her eyelashes as he bits his lip, rubs his finger against his opposing knuckle, brushes his fingers through his wavy hair. 

 

She can’t see his eyes, but she watches as the candle illuminates and paints a moving picture of shadows across the breadth of his face. 

 

He look up and catches her staring; he smiles. (She doesn’t smile back.)

 

* * *

 

“If you could go anywhere, right now, where would you want to go?” Tom asks her.

 

She lies on her back, her toes pushing against his thigh, her hair sprawled across the wooden floor. “I don’t know,” she says.

 

He reaches a hand to grasp her foot and holds on, says, “Would you go back to that old house in the country?”

 

She freezes for a second, two, breathes in, (dusty shelves, old books, boredom, boredom, war, no wood, no wardrobe, no fur coats, no, no, n—), “no,” she says.

 

His index finger taps on her toe, once, twice, again. “Then where?” he asks.

 

“I don’t know,” she says.

 

* * *

 

She goes to America.

 

Mum and Dad decide to take her and so they make the still dangerous voyage across the Atlantic, and America is beautiful, she decides. 

 

Perhaps it is just different, that’s all, strangely untouched by the war which has devastated their homeland, a reminder that life goes on, that noise and music and lights can fill your soul and speak to it, wrap life around your heart until it forces it to beat again, to pound with the rhythm of existence and something that seems an awful lot like hope. 

 

She walks through the streets of New York with Mum arm in arm, and she breathes and remembers that she is young. New York is different than anything else, louder and braver and more in some way that she cannot quite wrap her arms around. She loves it, its irreverence, its inability to remember the realities of the world around them, its lights and action and spirit. 

 

The noise in the city drowns out the screaming protests of her brain. 

 

She loves it.

 

* * *

 

They go back to England so that she can return to school and Lucy and Edmund greet her with a transformed cousin and heartbreak and stories longing to fall on willing ears, but she regales them with stories of her own instead. 

 

New York had drowned out the memory of a medieval land with its light and technologies and distant separation from war and struggle. She will not allow her ears to be open again.

 

* * *

 

Time passes and there are rumblings around the castle, a dead girl, worries and tensions reflecting across the stone. There’s fluttering of hands and gossip and hysteric girls worrying that they will be next. 

 

“Just an accident,” the teachers say at first, but Tom shakes his head at her when she looks at him, and he’s right, the half-giant pulled away from class and wand snapped before anyone can say nay. 

 

Susan gathers a sobbing Lucy in her arms when they hear that Hagrid is gone from school. “It wasn’t him, I know it wasn’t,” she says through her tears, her little fists clenched with a child’s faith and a woman’s determination. “It wasn’t.” She looks up to Susan as Susan rubs her back, but Susan has nothing to say. They say it was Hagrid’s fault. (Tom says so too; they rewarded him for finding out. Hagrid might not have known better she generously thinks.) 

 

“It wasn’t,” Lucy says and her face falls when Susan says nothing and something hardens in her eyes. “It wasn’t.”

 

* * *

 

She sees Dumbledore stare at Tom sometimes like he’s trying to see something elusive and dangerous. 

 

“He keeps staring at you,” she tells Tom during dinner without looking back up at the teacher’s table. 

 

“I know,” Tom says, his voice almost amused, a little concerned. 

 

He says nothing more, and so she says nothing, just taps her finger on the table. 

 

“I wish he’d stop,” she says. 

 

Tom leans over and kisses the side of her head. “My noble defender,” he says. 

 

She looks up after Tom has returned to his plate. She stares through the twinkling, golden light and meets Dumbledore’s peering eyes. They each look for a second before Dumbledore turns to his neighbor and chuckles, and Susan looks away, meets Peter’s indignant, concerned eyes on the far side of the room. 

 

She looks away first. 

 

* * *

 

They’re seated outside in the just barely warming air, the grass a little greener than it had been the day before. Tom’s thigh presses against hers under their robes, and she can feel the warmth of his skin even through the heavy weight of the fabric. His fingers twirl his wand with absentminded skill and she smiles to see it. 

 

“It’s frustrating that the Restricted Section is even restricted,” he says suddenly. 

 

Susan frowns and thinks. “Do you want our peers to know restricted magic?” she laughs. 

 

He doesn’t laugh. “We should know all that magic has to offer,” he says. “It shouldn’t be limited to a few paltry skills.” 

 

Susan looks down at her own wand, thinks of witches and dwarves and magic rising to fingertips and trees coming alive, at the possibility and looks over at the trees waving gently in the spring wind. 

 

“No,” she says eventually, “I suppose not.” 

 

“Don’t you want to know?” Tom asks, his voice rising as he thinks. “There’s so much they haven’t told us, things that could make life better and could make us so much stronger!” 

 

His eyes flash red briefly and she thinks she should be scared of him, of the boy who is brimming with power and potential. She leans forward and kisses him instead. 

 

She presses her lips against his gently, quickly, just a moment of lips against lips, breaths held in heaving lungs, and slowly pulls away. 

 

“Susan,” he says and leans forward again. He captures her lips with his own and reaches up to grab her face in his hand, fingers pressed into flesh, inches between them. “Susan,” he breathes.

 

* * *

 

“How are you really?” Edmund asks as they walk through the courtyard. The others have left for Hogsmeade already, so they are taking advantage of the moment of quiet to walk arm in arm. She had waved Tom off with a smile and wrapped her arm in Edmund’s gladly. 

 

He presses her arm to his with his left hand and holds it there with courtly pressure and slowly begins to walk her around the perimeter. 

 

“Tired,” she says. “But I’m looking forward to summer hols.” 

 

“Me too,” Edmund says, “but I meant about Narnia. I don’t think I really understood last time, what that meant for you.” 

 

Susan briefly tightens her grip on Edmund’s arm. She forces a laugh from her lungs. “Narnia?” she says. “That game we used to play?” 

 

Edmund doesn’t stop walking, just guides them toward the road to Hogsmeade silently. “Yes,” he says eventually. “Narnia.” 

 

“There is no Narnia,” Susan says, her voice worn and firm. “There was no Narnia and there is no Narnia. Remember that.” 

 

Edmund looks straight ahead at the road in front of him and frowns. “No,” he says. “There is and there was. I won’t forget that.” 

 

His shoulders are back and straight and he’s taller than her again (no, just now, just finally taller, that’s all), and she tightens her grip on his arm and doesn’t say another word. 

 

* * *

 

“Why won’t you just say you remember?” Lucy asks, throwing her hands up in the air. “It happened and you can’t possibly forget that!”

 

“There is nothing to forget, Lucy!” she says, “and that’s that!” 

 

They’re hissing at each other in the corner of a hallway, Edmund leaning against a wall three feet away and Peter standing with his back to the rest of the corridor, his arms folded against his chest. 

 

“Don’t speak like that to Lu,” he says. 

 

“What?” Susan scoffs. “What about how she’s talking to me? How she keeps bringing it up when I think I’ve made my position abundantly and excruciatingly clear?”

 

“Because she’s right!” Peter says firmly, and Susan backs away. 

 

“I don’t care,” she hisses, her wand sparking from its tight-fisted grip in her right hand. “She’s not, not to me.” 

 

Edmund still leans against the wall, one foot braced against the stone. His head is tilted down and he studiously studies the ground. 

 

“Edmund?” she says. 

 

He sighs then and looks up. “They’re right,” he says and before she can speak, he continues to Peter and Lucy, “but leave her alone. If she won’t remember, you can’t make her. We each can only take responsibility for ourselves.” 

 

Lucy’s shoulders deflate and Peter sighs and moves away from his protective block of the hall. In the distance, she can see Tom waiting, can read the curiosity in his shoulders. 

 

“I need to go,” she says. Peter lets her pass but before she steps too far away from them, he calls out. 

 

“Susan,” he says. “Try...try to remember.” 

 

She doesn’t turn around, doesn’t acknowledge his request, just keeps walking through the long, cold, stone corridor to Tom who waits patiently for her at the end. 

 

He greets her with a smile, and she can tell he wants to ask but he doesn’t, just wraps his arm around her shoulders and they walk off together. 

 

She wants to look behind her at their faces, but she doesn’t. She won’t ruin this with them. She looks up at Tom, at his smooth face and dark hair and depthless eyes, and when he smiles at her, she smiles back. 

 

* * *

 

The next year Tom and Peter are gone, Peter off to University like a muggle, Tom off in search of employment and a future. She misses him, misses his companionship, his way of understanding her and appreciating her, of wanting to understand her, of challenging her in every possible way. 

 

She just misses him, that’s all. 

 

* * *

 

“Why did you pick me?” she asks him one afternoon at Hogsmeade. They have a corner of the pub to their own and she’s under his arm, the shadows blanketing them from view, with a butterbeer on the table but Tom’s fire whiskey by her lips. 

 

“Because you’re special,” Tom says immediately. 

 

Susan laughs. “I’m not special,” she says. 

 

Tom tightens his grip on her shoulder, his pressure almost painful, and says, “you are,” with unwavering confidence. “I can tell.” 

 

“hm,” she says and turns her face to rest in the crook of his shoulder. She breathes in the faint muskiness and ink and parchment that makes Tom, _Tom_. 

 

“Have you talked to Peter?” Tom asks casually.

 

“No,” she responds. 

 

“Not at all?” he asks. 

 

“Just through Ed,” she tells him, and Tom hums in the back of this throat, his eyes distant and distracted. 

 

“Why?” she asks. 

 

“No reason,” he says but looks down at her and smiles. “I don’t like to see you upset.” 

 

“We just don’t understand each other right now. That’s all,” she says. 

 

Tom kisses the top of her head and his arm tightens around her shoulder, just barely not too tight. “If you say so.”

 

“I do,” she whispers. 

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t talk to Peter. She hears about him from Edmund, says hello from an elusive distance through the words and somber eyes of her brother and ignores the always sad gaze of her sister. She can see Lucy stare at her across the hall, can read the words perpetually on the tip of her tongue, and will not respond. 

 

As the year progresses, she finds the strangest thing—the Slytherins do not leave her alone. They follow her now, watch her as she glides through the halls, ensure that no one brings her harm. The young girls straighten their shoulders like her, comb their hair like her, smile like her (it’s strange, she finds. It’s flattering a bit, but strange and unfamiliar; a little cold and artificial, smiles too studied to be genuine). The boys follow her through the halls, just a half a hallway behind, and she lets them follow until she corners them in the early twilight of an autumn evening and holds her wand up to their faces. 

 

“What is going on,” she demands, her lips tense and face aloof. 

 

“It’s Tom,” one boy stammers. “He told us to watch you.” 

 

She checks his story with the other boys’ faces, sees their poorly hidden fear and humphs. She stares them down for a minute, seconds into seconds, can almost hear the panicked thumping of their hearts beating. 

 

“Well then,” she says and tosses her hair behind her head. “learn some subtly, honestly.” 

 

The boys look to meet her gaze and she meets them steadily. 

 

Tom told them to watch her (to look over her). Tom did not leave her alone—true, he left her with a poor substitute for his gentility and intelligence, but she will not accuse him of forgetfulness. 

 

She straightens her back. (Tom told them to watch her.)

 

(Let them see her.)

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t hide so much after that, offers her earnest and artificial copycats her humble attention, smiles at them, compliments them when one has done something truly remarkable. 

 

She studies more, walks taller and stronger. Tom is gone, but when they see her, they think of him. Let her remind them. 

 

(She sneaks into the Restricted section, too, then. She is silent and invisible to all that would think her dangerous. She walks into the section and pulls book after book off their dusted shelves and she reads. And she remembers.)

 

* * *

 

She leaves on a boat rocking across the water, the lights and towering stone of Hogwarts rising behind her. She spares one last look at its sprawling majesty, at all that it is and all that it represents (and all that it resembles). She leaves on a humble wooden boat, one of the same ones upon which they all arrived, and it is a different world to which she goes. She pulls her cloak tighter around her shoulders and as the boats reach the shore, she steps out and doesn’t look back. 

 

It’s almost a goodbye. 

 

* * *

 

Tom works at Borgin and Burkes, and he’s good at it. He’s charming and intense and Tom’s boss says he’s the best he’s ever seen. 

 

(She tried to convince him to join the ministry, but he had said no, and that had been all he said and she hadn’t tried to say anything more. His eyes had hardened and his fists had tightened, and no means no, she thinks. That’s perfectly acceptable; at any rate, Tom will be successful at anything he does.) 

 

So he works, and she thinks he doesn’t like it, but she doesn’t protest again. He’s more frustrated now then he used to be, angrier and more exuberant at the same time. He’s filled with visions for the future, for a world which looks to him for its ideas and to her for its beauty. He tells her so all the time. 

 

“I’ll give you a castle,” he tells her when they sit in his flat in Diagon Alley, the sounds of the wizarding world below them. “I’ll give you everything you could want.” 

 

She doesn’t argue with him originally, and so he keeps saying it, continues to tell her everything that will one day be hers (the knowledge, the jewels, the castle, the vaults, the power…he will give it all to her). 

 

“You’re special,” he says in the dark of the night as she lies beside him. “You’re mine.”

 

(“You’re mine,” he hisses when he sees other men look her direction. “You’re mine,” he says when she sits in front of the mirror curling her hair. _You’remineYou’remineYou’remine_. She thinks briefly that the child she used to be would have hated that. That child was so naive, she thinks.)

 

* * *

 

Tom comes to her one day in something far closer to panic than she might have anticipated, his eyes flashing and hair tousled, with his bag in his hand. “It’s everything I need,” he tells her. “I need you to grab your things now.” 

 

Susan holds out a hand to him, presses it against his furiously beating chest; “what’s wrong?” she asks and shoves him in a chair. 

 

“Do you trust me?” he asks her, and she stares into his eyes with bewilderment. 

 

“Of course,” she says. 

 

“Then come with me,” he says and leaps up from his chair. He comes close to her and gathers her hands in his. “Come with me, now.” 

 

“I…” she tries to speak and frees her hands. “I can’t,” she says frustrated. She looks around her small flat with its green plants by the windowsill and books on the table, at the little life which she has carved for herself. “I can’t just leave.” 

 

“Well, I have to go,” he says, his voice cold and reserved. His eyes are furious and deep, and for a brief second, she’s scared of him. 

 

“I can’t leave all of a sudden. My family would be worried and Peter would come find me. If you need to go, then I can only imagine you don’t want Peter to track us down.”

 

Tom sags then and rests his hands on the table between them. “No,” he says. “That wouldn’t be good.” 

 

She takes a chance and comes close to him again, smooths the hair that has fallen across his face. “Tell me what happened,” she whispers. 

 

“Someone might blame me for something I didn’t do,” Tom says. “Something was stolen from work, and they might think I did it.”

 

“Did you?” she asks. 

 

Tom leans down and stares her straight in the eyes, dark meeting dark once again, he leans forward to kiss her forehead and then backs up again. “No,” he says. 

 

She nods then and leans forward and kisses his lips. She presses herself against him and holds on. His arms encircle her waist and he pulls her so close to his chest she feels like she cannot breathe. “Go without me,” she breathes. 

 

He kisses her lips, once, twice, then her nose. “Alright,” he says. “I’ll send for you.”

 

And that is his promise and Susan knows he will not break it. 

 

“Go,” she commands, and in this, he obeys. 

 

* * *

 

Peter has invaded her apartment with tense shoulders and a lined face, a man seemingly much older than the boy she had seen several months before now. He stands by her table with his fingers tightly gripping the chair in front of him. He leans forward, pressing his weight onto its wooden frame and then rocks back on his heels. 

 

“You’re sure you don’t know where he is?” Peter asks.

 

Susan stares him straight in the eyes with the table between them and says, “no. For the very, and I repeat _very_ , last time, no.” 

 

Peter nods slowly then and walks around and wraps her in his arms. She stays stiff for a moment at the unexpected contact, but she relaxes into his arms quickly. She has missed him, for all of her resentment and fury and frustration, she has missed Peter and his life and spirit and dedication and love and their mutual understanding. 

 

She leans into his warm embrace and says nothing. 

 

Peter leans back and grasps her forearms in his gentle grasp. “Won’t you come home?” he asks. “I’m meeting the Professor and Polly for dinner soon and I know they’d love to see you.” 

 

Susan meets Peter’s open gaze and almost smiles before her amusement twists into that oh so familiar resentment. “You’ve almost learned how to be subtle,” she tells him, lip curled in such a way that leaves no room for misunderstanding. 

 

“Susan,” Peter says. 

 

“I think it’s time you left,” Susan says and pulls her arms away. 

 

“Su.” 

 

Susan spins to the dishes waiting patiently on the counter. “Go Peter.” He walks toward the door and before he can open the door she says, “don’t ask me again. I mean it. I love you, I do. Don’t ask me again.” 

 

Peter doesn’t say anything, doesn’t argue, doesn’t agree, just opens the door and leaves, shutting the door gently behind him. 

 

* * *

 

She gets letters from Tom occasionally, just little mentions of his life and hints of where he has settled, and during her next holiday, she packs a small bag and heads to the Continent. 

 

It’s so surprisingly easy to find him she wonders if the aurors even tried. 

 

He meets her with a welcoming smile and with tension at his eyes. He’s rough around the edges, brusk and demanding, requesting everything she has learned, all the forbidden knowledge she has attained. 

 

She tells him. 

 

And when she does, when she gives him what he demands, he looks at her with such love and possession she thinks she needs nothing else. He looks at her like she’s a mystery, something unfathomable and undefinable, like she’s a prize he has yet to win. 

 

She loves him. 

 

* * *

 

She goes back to England and continues with a life that is hers, something fragile and dependable at the same time. She talks to her parents and her siblings and refuses to allow them the luxury of dictating the conversation. She will not talk about that which they wish to discuss. 

 

She will not. (She does not.)

 

She goes to work and practices magic and reads any book she finds— forbidden alleys are wonderful treasure troves she finds, full of imagination and potential and things that are forbidden for no discernible reason other than they can be a threat. 

 

She finds that amusing. If that’s the reason, then no human should ever connect with another. No witch should ever grasp a wand; no wizard should ever be able to desire a witch. 

 

They’re all threats. 

 

It’d be almost amusing, if it wasn’t so irritating. 

 

* * *

 

Life goes on. 

 

She’s lonely and tired and _angry_. 

 

Angry at a world stuck in the past, at a world that does not feel as familiar as it ought. Angry at her siblings for their devotion to _remembering_ something that did not remember them. Angry at Tom (missing Tom). 

 

Life goes on. 

 

* * *

 

But that’s the thing though: it doesn’t. It ends with a held breath, blood seeping through linen, the crash of a railway car. 

 

Life ends. 

 

It cuts short with jagged edges and fragmented pieces, and in a second of pain, in the space between seconds, they must come to grasps with the bewildering fragility of life. 

 

Life ends. 

 

She’s in her flat with the plants by the windowsill and gently flowing curtains that dance in the breeze and dusty books lining the wall, and the careful, precarious building blocks of her life come falling down. 

 

_gonerailwaycrashallofthemaroundthebendgonegonegonegone. gone._

 

And it’s over. 

 

Just like that. 

 

Time is ringing around her ears, the waving curtains blending between her eyes until color is a kaleidoscope and the air is missing from her lungs. 

 

Life ends. 

 

(Mum, Dad, Peter, Edmund, Lucy, Jill, Eustace, the Professor, Miss Plummer)

 

Life ends. 

 

(Her lungs breathe in the air with a sudden gasp and her lungs heave with the sudden relief but only for a second then two and she’s fallen into a chair and she’s not crying but not thinking, not sure, not sure, not possible. She’s breathing in the air around her and she’s not dying even though her heart is breaking. Her lungs are breathing and she sees her hands clenching and she’s breathing, breathing, breathing.) 

 

* * *

 

Her life doesn’t end. 

 

(Is it the greatest irony?) 

 

* * *

 

She alone stands by a line of graves. The other mourners have walked away, their arms locked in each others’ and their grief falling away from her ears the farther they walk. 

 

Her back is warm from the sun behind her, and she wants to scream. 

 

(England finally sunny, on the one day she wants it to cry. _Goddamn it all to hell_ , she thinks.) 

 

She looks up at the deserted horizon line in the distance, at the fresh ground before her and she wants to fall down and never leave it again. 

 

She stays staying though, briefly wavering in the air before summoning all her strength and straightening her back and raising her chin. 

 

Off in the distance to her right, she sees a cat resting by the base of a gravestone. It’s a street cat, a tabby cat, and suddenly she cannot help but remember the details of a much larger cat in excruciating detail. 

 

“Is there nothing but tragedy with you?” she asks the cat. It stares at her with unblinking disinterest. “Did you have to take them too?” 

 

It doesn’t answer. 

 

“Did you?” she yells. It licks its paws. “Answer me!”

 

The cat jumps up onto the top of the gravestone and stares at her with steady brown eyes before jumping down again and walking away. 

 

She sags to the ground and clutches the cool soil in her fists and stares as she lets it sift through her fingers. “Damn you, Aslan,” she says to no one. 

 

She rests there on the ground, dried tears lining her face, and she remembers. 

 

She remembers the power and the happiness and the loss, and she remembers and she is angry. 

  
She remembers making men fall before her and failing and trying and the feeling of magic rushing through her fingers. She remembers, and she thinks that they will all wish she had forgotten. 

 

Pressing her hands to the ground, Susan pushes herself off the ground. She stares back down at the earthen graves below her before spinning on her heels and walking away, head high and chest back, Queen Susan of Narnia, the Conqueror of England. She has been promised castles, she remembers. She will claim them. 

 

* * *

 

She packs a bag and leaves England and goes looking for Tom. 

 

She marches into his new flat but lets him come to her. 

 

“I was a queen,” she tells him later, her voice weary and shoulders burdened. “I was a queen,” she repeats but the truth tastes like freedom and peace and triumph and she throws her shoulders back to meet his gaze. 

 

“Where?” Tom asks. 

 

“Another world far away from here,” she says. “It sounds crazy.” 

 

Tom slowly rises from his chair and turns to face her. “I’ve heard crazy before,” he tells her and slowly approaches. She takes a step back, but he grabs her face in his hands and peers into her eyes. His hands wall both sides of her face and she cannot move and yet his fingers are gentle on her cheeks. He stares into her eyes, blue meeting brown, and the moment seems to linger for an age. 

 

It’s silent in this room, the fading sun peeking through the curtains as the only witness to the moment of admission. She is holding her breath, waiting, and yet she feels as though she can breathe for the first time in weeks. His eyes are fathomless, depthless, pools of unapologetic intelligence and complicated reason. Slowly, his lips begin to curl and the lines by his eyes crinkle and he is smiling—there is something cold and something triumphant, but before she can question what she sees, Tom has pressed his lips against hers. One arm moves to encircle her waist and he pulls her flush against his chest. He leans back from her then and looks down. “I knew it,” he says, and his face shines with victory. “I knew there was something special about you.” 

 

Susan smiles then, because he’s right. She is special, the last of the four, and she will not forget her crown. (Let her forget their betrayal, their ignorance, their inability to accept this world, their refusal to trust her judgment with Tom, their continued effort to convince her to not be close to him.) As she stares into his eyes, she wants to laugh. How could she have left him? He wants, that’s all. ( _And why should that be a crime?_ she wonders. They have all wanted and have been ignored and been granted, and why should Tom be any different?) She has been denied love, denied comfort, and she will not deny herself of Tom. 

 

She won’t. 

 

He has backed away from her now, and his eyes trace her body, and she straightens in response. She throws her shoulders back, raises her head, and tightens her face into studied blankness. 

 

Tom smiles. 

 

She steps toward him, calm, confident, assured. “Tom,” she says, voice breathy and low. 

 

She reaches up and brushes her fingers through his hair, traces his nose, his lips before leaning in and letting her lips brush his. A moment, two, the sun warming their faces, dust weaving in the air, the sounds of the street below reaching their ears. The moment dances on, time not halted, just slow. Moment into moment, just two humans broken by time, by history, by purposeful action and senseless destruction, but together. 

 

_It’d be easy to forget like this_ , Susan thinks as he kisses her brow. _I won’t._

 

He leads her to the settee by the wall, and she sits as he kneels before her. “Queen Susan,” he whispers, and his eyes are glowing (with life, with happiness, Susan is sure). 

 

“Yes,” she answers, and it is all that needs said. 

 

* * *

 

The darkness doesn’t seem dark, she reflects much later. It feels like rebellion, like the abandonment of shackles bound to her ankles since birth, like the grasping of the intangible, incomprehensible air that swirls around them all. 

 

It’s the recognition of possibility, the refusal to accept the limitations imposed upon them by those who wish to see society subjected to their capricious and hungry hearts. 

 

Darkness, as they call it, is scintillating, enthralling, entrancing, humbling, and uplifting at the very same time. It’s forbidden, and thus its existence means pleasure in and of itself. 

 

It doesn’t feel like darkness. 

 

It tastes sweet, like the richness of a fine wine and feels like the finest silk slipping between her fingers. It’s everything she could want. 

 

So she searches for it. 

 

(It’s love and knowledge and the forbidden truth—and she doesn’t understand why the truth should be forbidden at all. This exists, and they ought to know it, understand it, by understood by it, and so it is not hard to follow Tom. There are costs to any decision, any path; consequences are consequences regardless of who is assigning the adjectives, and the line between good and bad is not so thick.)

 

* * *

 

She was wrong, she knows later. She was wrong.

**Author's Note:**

> wine probably doesn't work as an excuse anymore, does it? 
> 
> @adaperturamlibri on tumblr


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